If the projects are built, in just over a decade passengers could
be riding trains from Atlanta to Cobb County or to Emory University,
or traveling new, swifter ramps through the Ga. 400/I-285 interchange,
or finding countless arterial roads wider and less clogged, from Henry
County to Cherokee County and all points in between.
Why, in the second decade of the 21st century,
do we continue with a failed traffic model from the
middle of the 20th century?
Seems to me traffic safety should be
pertinent and should include pedestrians.
and instead of
more unsafe roads
making life unpleasant and unsafe for communities,
we could go for
roads that serve communities.
There are many jobs in this.
The
Five Points redevelopment
is an example of what she’s talking about.
It’s a lot better than building more sprawl:
safer, less expensive, more jobs, less energy cost, more energy independence,
better health, and more community.
Georgia Tech Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones spole January 2010 at TEDxAtlanta,
Retrofitting suburbia
In the last 50 years, we’ve been building the suburbs with a lot of
unintended consequences. And I’m going to talk about some of those
consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects
that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that
the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going
to be retrofitting suburbia. So whether it’s redeveloping dying malls
or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out
of parking lots, I think the fact is, the growing number of empty and
under-performing, especially, retail sites throughout suburbia gives
us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable
landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. And
in the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of
our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost, and
have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down
trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges.
Many T-SPLOST projects submitted by Lowndes County would make traffic safety
worse.
More from Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones of Georgia Tech:
Even Buford Highway, she says, could be transformed with medians,
trees and buildings set closer to the road. Changes that are known
to slow traffic. But outside of the ivory tower, change does not come
easily. Or quickly.
Last year Georgia spent more than two billion dollars on transportation,
but only a tiny fraction, less than 1 percent, went specifically to
pedestrian safety.
And what Lowndes County has sent in for T-SPLOST funding includes:
Traffic on Old Pine will be regulated by the amount of people who
use the highway;
traffic on Bemiss since you and I moved out there forty years ago.
…
I’m not going to argue Bemiss Highway, it’s not a pertinent fact.
That’s right, traffic and traffic safety are considered not pertinent
to building subdivisions, according to the Chairman of the Lowndes County
Commission, and the actions of the Commissioners and staff.
The developer gets to consider only their one property and
the neighbors get to deal with all the effects on all the related roads.
Privatization of profits and socialization of problems
such as traffic accidents.
Does that seem right to you?
If not, it’s going to go on until more people argue and
debate.
In fact, many of Lowndes County’s T-SPLOST tax request would make the problem worse.
See
next post.
Maybe people are starting to notice that far more people die in traffic
accidents in the U.S.A. than in foreign wars.
The projects submitted by Lowndes County for
TSPLOST funding
would make this problem even worse,
except the bus system, which wouldn’t require road widening.
In recent years a little noticed shift has been transforming suburbia:
the home of the middle class has become the home of the working poor. As
a result, roadways that were built for the car are now used by a growing
population that can’t afford to drive. The consequences can be deadly.
According to a recent report, by two national transportation groups,
about 43 thousand pedestrians were killed in the U.S. in the last decade;
“the equivalent of a jumbo jet going down roughly every month.”
Of course, the problem didn’t start with an increase in pedestrians.
Continue reading →
Schoolchildren, safety, and farmland: three topics that often seem forgotten in discussions of development.
Opposing the
proposed rezoning for Notthinghill,
neighbor Thomas E. Stalvey Jr. noted
that traffic on Cat Creek Road
is already a problem, and adding a subdivision would make it worse.
He noted that it’s traffic routed down Cat Creek to Moody that
accounts for a lot of it.
He said school children stood out on the road and they were already in danger.
“If we put 49 more houses out there, it’s just going to up the risk.”
“The very first
contract
for the first private prison in America
went to CCA, from INS.”
Hear her in this video
Private Prisons-Commerce in Souls by Grassroots Leadership
that explains the private prison trade of public safety for private profit:
A local leader once called private prisons “good clean industry”.
Does locking up people for private profit sound like “good clean industry” to you?
Remember, not only is the U.S. the worst in the world for locking people up
(more prisoners per capita and total than any other country in the world),
but Georgia is the worst in the country, with
1 in 13 adults in the prison system.
And private prisons
don’t save money and
they
don’t improve local employment.
As someone says in the video, who wants to live in a prison colony?
We don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.
Spend that tax money on rehabilitation and education.
Vince Schneider warned county homeowners that it could happen to them, too:
To permit
the establishment of the Foxborough Avenue McDonalds, the county has
irreversibly established a most terrible precedence. You too can wake
up one morning to find a Fast food store being built in your front
yard.
Like many of us, he wondered what the county government is thinking:
I cannot comprehend how the county can possibly
benefit from allowing such an establishment to be built in a quite
county residential neighborhood. Is it because it provides unskilled
low paying jobs? Will this McDonalds look good on a resume? It was my
understanding that Valdosta and Lowndes County wanted to attract a more
skilled, professional work force. The real estate on Foxborough Avenue
the county permitted McDonalds to build on would have been, and is prime
real estate for just such a professional enterprise….
Residential home owners of Lowndes County take notice —Vince Schneider @ LCC 14 June 2011
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 14 June 2011.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
After Vince Schneider finished reading his letter,
Chairman Ashley Paulk handed him a paper, which was apparently
a communication from County Engineer Mike Fletcher.
Appended is the text of the letter Vince Schneider read to the Commission.
Continue reading →
LAST week authorities
captured two fugitives who had been on the lam
for three weeks after escaping from an Arizona prison. The convicts and
an accomplice are accused of murdering a holiday-making married couple
and stealing their camping trailer during their run from justice. This
gruesome incident has raised questions about the wisdom and efficacy of
private prisons, such as the one from which the Arizona convicts escaped.
“Poorly fitted air conditioners cost New York City 130 to 180 million
dollars a year in extra energy consumption,” one of the strategists,
Capt. Wayne Porter of the Navy, said Tuesday. “They generate 370,525
extra tons of carbon dioxide.”
Suppose, he says, you fixed them. And then you got the 40 states
that waste the most electricity to match the 10 most efficient. The
likely benefits are no surprise — less foreign oil, cost savings,
job creation, decreased pollution.
Now follow that thread to
“A National Strategic Narrative,”
a paper
written by Captain Porter and Col. Mark Mykleby of the Marines, which
calls on the United States to see that it cannot continue to engage the
world primarily with military force, but must do so as a nation powered
by the strength of its educational system, social policies, international
development and diplomacy, and its commitment to sustainable practices
in energy and agriculture.
“We must recognize that security means more than defense,” they
write. After ending the 20th century as the world’s most powerful
country, “we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel,
is not a sustainable form of energy.”
If the projects are built, in just over a decade passengers could be riding trains from Atlanta to Cobb County or to Emory University, or traveling new, swifter ramps through the Ga. 400/I-285 interchange, or finding countless arterial roads wider and less clogged, from Henry County to Cherokee County and all points in between.
